Fans of LARP (live-action role-playing) and other forms of interactive storytelling will want to know about the newly-published Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, a free online anthology about interactive storytelling being featured March 1–3 at Intercon, outside of Boston, one of the nation’s largest conventions devoted to LARP.

“There’s something in the Wyrd Con Companion Book for everyone,” wrote co-editor Aaron Vanek, in an email, “from live action role players intrigued by LARP history to educators wondering about the power of role-playing in the classroom. There are tips to good role-playing for players as well as studies on the psychology and motivations behind role-playing.”

For those unclear on the terminology here, “interactive storytelling” is catch-all term for games where the audience and actors are both part of the performance. Wyrd Con’s mission is to entertain and educate about interactive storytelling in all forms — LARPs, transmedia, alternate reality games (ARGs), pervasive games, interactive theater, and everything in between.

If you’re an adult who knows about the power and fun of larping (live-action role-playing), then you’ll want to pass that experience on to your kids. But perhaps there’s no organization offering larping for young people in your community. Guard Up! wants to change that.

Guard Up!, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, is raising funds via a Kickstarter campaign to create a license for their youth program called “Wizards & Warriors.” The licensing program would allow activity providers anywhere, such as recreation centers, martial arts schools, fencing clubs, after-school groups, gyms, and fitness centers with youth programs, to run weekly adventures and monthly events using their game system.

“This program is designed to engage kids and teens in live, story-based adventures where they play a character in an ongoing storyline,” said Guard Up! and Wizards & Warriors founder Meghan Gardner. In the adventure games she and her staff orchestrate, the kids (they call them “Heroes”) fight monsters with foam swords, win treasure and solve ancient mysteries; a futuristic version of their game system, called “Zombie Blaster Adventures,” uses Nerf Blaster guns. “Both programs involve kids interacting with creatures and characters out of real life history, literature, and mythology.”

A Celt relaxes between battles at Knight Realms, one of the LARPs featured in the new book Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games by Lizzie Stark (Photo credit: Kyle Ober; photo courtesy of James C. Kimball)

So you want to be Harry Potter, or Aragorn, or Frodo, or Kirk or Picard, or a barbarian. Or some mash-up — say, a steampunked brigand Robin Hood character who pilots a dirigible while stealing from the rich and giving the poor. Or a dwarf who’s in love with a werewolf. Or name your universe.

In LARP (live-action role-playing), you can be all that you can be.

However one describes this hobby/art form/performance — part Dungeons & Dragons game gone native, part walk-through choose-your-own adventure, part real-life video game with padded battle-axes and swords, part improv theater in the woods — LARP is experiencing a cultural surge.

Why? As Huey Lewis once sung, it’s hip to be square. We all feel more comfortable in our geekiness. But also this: Perhaps gamers are tiring of getting their fantasy fixes via screens. Because LARP requires being there — in the flesh. You can’t phone or Skype in a LARP. Folks get their DIY geek on, crafting their own capes and slapping on their own make-up. If the game master says it’s OK to play a French zombie-elf with a penchant for cheese, you run wild and do it. In the real world. You have to be real while you are being, er, fake. Like in novels, sometimes you have to make stuff up to tell the truth.

Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games (Chicago Review Press), a new book by journalist Lizzie Stark, gets to the heart of these questions.